Increased use of networks such as local area networks (LAN) and wide area networks (WAN) creates network traffic from sources such as application software, network applications, network operating systems (NOS) and distributed database programs that generate various “housekeeping” messages. Policy Based Network Management (PBM) environments offer one solution to managing this increasing network traffic. PBM environments involve the establishment of priorities for network traffic based on parameters such as traffic-type, application and user identification. Many network transmission technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) have great success with this type of traffic management as a result of increasing Quality of Service (QoS) levels. Servers on the PBM network send out the policy rules to a number of devices present on the network. The devices receive policy rules and translate the rules to a format that is meaningful to the device.